Krebs on Security

In-depth security news and investigation

Posts Tagged: senneco

Stories in this blog’s Breadcrumbs series have sought to comb through clues that point to the possible location and identities of malware authors and purveyors. But from time to time those clues lead definitively back to an individual. In today’s post, we’ll talk with the author of the Pincer Trojan for Android — a 32-year-old programmer at a mobile app development firm in Russia.

In April, Finnish security firm F-Securefirst warned about Trojan:Android/Pincer.A, which comes disguised as a security certificate and is designed to surreptitiously intercept and forward text messages. As F-Secure notes, previous malicious mobile apps pretending to be certificates have been mobile components of banking Trojans aimed at defeating two-factor authentication.

F-Secure researchers observed that Pincer used the IMEI of the victim’s phone as an identifier, and that the Trojan would call home to a control server and report the device’s phone and serial numbers, phone model, carrier and OS version. They also found that Pincer checks to see if it’s being run in a virtual environment, which is a common trick designed to frustrate malware analysis tools used by security researchers.

Interestingly, F-Secure noted that the code within the trojan includes a class called “USSDDumbExtendedNetworkService” — a component that was assigned a seemingly arbitrary variable that F-Secure researchers said was probably either associated with a French Canadian concrete company or the Twitter handle of a young Russian whose Google+ page lists employment as “Android developer”.

I followed up with F-Secure about this post, and learned that the redacted portion of that post — the variable included in that first variant of the Pincer Trojan — was “senneco.com” (Virustotal’s analysis lists it as “com.senneco”). A quick search on Google turns up Twitter and Google+ accounts by this name belonging to a Yuri Shmakov from Novosibirsk, Russia. Shmakov’s Google+ page says he is a developer at Arello-Mobile, a mobile app development firm also in Novosibirsk.

A scan of Shmakov’s accounts turned up the email address senneco@gmail.com. I sent an email to that address, explaining F-Secure’s findings and asking whether the recipient had anything to do with the Pincer Trojan. To my surprise, Shmakov promptly replied that, why yes he had indeed created it as a freelance project.

Shmakov told me that, based on the client’s specifications, he suspected it might ultimately be put to nefarious uses. Even so, he completed the job and signed his work by including his nickname in the app’s code.